Kiss Me First (17 page)

He replied with a single: ?

I sent a brief email explaining that I – Tess – had moved to Canada, keeping to the larky, casual tone that had been established. I had several versions of this ‘introductory’ email that I used, depending on the recipient. They ranged from the casual
fancied a change, I’m loving it!
for not very close friends, to a more in-depth and intimate account referencing her depression for those whom she trusted and who already had some context. To be safe, with Connor I went for the first option, because I didn’t know how much he knew of Tess’s problems.

Good thing I did, because it was clear from his reply that he had no idea about Tess’s depression; or the extent of it, anyhow. His reply expressed surprise and again, using what I could only presume were private references, he bombarded her with questions, sending each in a separate email so Tess’s inbox was constantly active.
How are you going to survive without a good Whiskey Sour? Where are you going to buy your holdups? I can’t really see you knitting your own beret . . .

And then in the fifth of such single-line emails, there was the biggest clue I’d had so far.
And what about Joan?
he wrote.
Did you smuggle her over in your hand luggage?

Joan was Tess’s cat between the years 2000 and 2003, named after an actress called Joan Crawford. She disappeared one day, an incident that sparked a fortnight-long slump. So, from this reference I established that Connor had not had a proper conversation with Tess for at least nine years.

A few emails later, I was granted my second useful piece of information, which further narrowed down the time-frame. When I mentioned that you could only reach Sointula by ferry, he wrote:

Ah, well we know how much you like ferries . . . or does there have to be a major disaster involved?

This, I thought, was likely to be a reference to an incident in 2001, on the day of the September 11th attacks in New York. Tess had been travelling with a friend, Juliet, to a Greek island called Patras, and they had been on a ferry from Italy when they heard the news of the planes from another passenger. It was a twelve-hour crossing and that night, Tess had sex with a stranger she met on board, an eighteen-year-old public-school boy called Rollo with curly blond hair ‘like a Botticelli angel’ and a conditional place at Oxford. They did it on deck, with their fellow passengers sleeping all around them.

So Connor must have known Tess after 2001, but stopped communications with her before 2003, when the cat disappeared. However, I was still none the wiser on who he was or the nature of their relationship. And, indeed, why he was contacting her again after all this time. From the beginning, the tone of his emails had an intimacy that wasn’t commensurate with his and Tess’s relationship in recent years – which was, as I say, nonexistent. He wrote as if they had never lost contact and were in the middle of a fascinating conversation. There was a sort of – what’s the word? A presumption. He was also quite forthright with Tess, in a way that most people weren’t. I think lots of her friends were a bit scared of her – or, at least, indulged the silly or mad things she said.

And he was extremely curious, asking questions that sent me rummaging through my more obscure Tess files.
Do you still think Aha are highly underrated? Did Shauna end up running that guest house in Sri Lanka?
Or he would send me a joke, and ask me to finish it off, or a silly clip from YouTube. He was by far the most frequent emailer Tess had, and I found I was spending much of my time thinking about what I was going to write to him.

At first, I took the tactic of ignoring his questions and instead asking some of my own, to try and gather some more information. Initially his replies were flippant and uninformative: he seemed incapable of giving a straight answer. For instance, I asked him what he was doing now and he replied,
Still overpaid, still battling against rotters
, which was unhelpful. After a few of these bantering exchanges, I decided that I was going to take a risk and ask him to give me direct replies to my questions.

K dude
–
one of Tess’s email habits was to drop the ‘O’ from ‘OK’ –
come on, give it to me straight. I haven’t seen you for ever. Just tell me what’s happening with you
. Stating requests so explicitly may have not been the way Tess interacted with him but I figured that I could get away with it, as so much time had elapsed since they had last communicated.

The strategy worked. The next email from Connor was much longer, and, although not wholly free of flippancy, provided a certain number of facts. He was working as a lawyer for a large firm based in Temple, specializing in property law, and lived in Kensal Rise. He had been married but split up with his wife Chrissie the previous year. They had two children, of whom they shared custody, a five-year-old girl called Maya and a two-year-old boy called Ben. He didn’t say how long he had been married, but it can’t have been longer than seven years, even if he had met Chrissie just after he and Tess lost touch.

It was a short, factual email, but later, at 11.30 p.m. UK time, he sent another one, with the heading
Continued:

You’re wondering why I’ve got back in touch with you. Here goes. You know that when I was with you, it was the happiest time of my life. Yes, scoff away; I know it wasn’t very long. But honestly, I look back on those months like they were this holiday in another life, the life I imagined I would have when I was a teenager. Full of bravado and daring and risk-taking, the feeling that anything was possible. You were beholden to nothing. We talked about big issues, important stuff, about how best to live. You inspired me. You encouraged me to take my photography seriously, to not sell out, to live boldly.

I’m not trying to guilt trip you, I just want to be honest. You make me want to be honest. I was absolutely devastated when you ended it. Beyond gutted. I pretended that it wasn’t such a big deal, that I knew we weren’t suited, that I agreed with whatever bullshit rationale you used – ‘we don’t make each other the best possible versions of ourselves’ or whatever. But you did make me the best ‘me’. I honestly think I knew then that you were it, my chance for the life I wanted, and that I’d blown it (I still don’t know how exactly) and that the rest of my life would be a compromise.

Chrissie was a mistake. I met her maybe a month after you, it was this dinner party set up by my mate Dennis, meant to cheer me up because I was still in bits about you. These friends of mine were nice people, but they were quite dull, you know. Lawyers. And Chrissie was like them, too – sweet and nice and pretty and unchallenging and perfectly happy with the status quo. She had no ambitions beyond the ordinary. And I don’t know whether I was just exhausted and wanted some security, or if I thought in a bizarre way that it would be getting back at you (not that you would have given a shit). I thought – OK, then, I’ll do it. I can be this. I’ll settle, I’ll give in. Maybe they’re right, and I’m wrong, and a steady, settled life is the key to happiness. Arranged marriages report the greatest levels of happiness, etc etc.

It’s amazing how easy it is to fall into these things, really. It’s like, when you get to your mid-thirties, especially if you’re a guy, the moment you stop struggling you find yourself being carried down this path towards marriage and babies and a family car. I started seeing Chrissie, and there we were, going for walks along the South Bank, taking a bottle of Wolf Blass to dinner parties, having mini-breaks in £200 a night fishermen’s cottages in Whitstable, being taken aside by her friends at parties and told that I’d better be serious about her, because you can’t mess around women in their thirties, you know . . . and how she’d make such a good mother, being such a nurturing person . . . being taken to meet her uptight parents in Gloucester, her revealing her teenage eating disorder, blah blah blah. And then it was a year later and that meant it was time to move in together. So we did that. Then the trips to Habitat and the box sets. The group Sunday lunches in gastro pubs, the predictable opinions lifted from The Guardian, the Jamie Oliver Flavour Shaker.

I just surrendered to all of it, took the path of least resistance. I know that you have no respect for that sort of behaviour, and it goes against everything you believe in. So I’m taking a big risk in telling you this, because the last thing I want is for you to think less of me.

I should say that I wasn’t unhappy all the time. There were periods when I was content, that I thought, maybe this is what it’s about. Especially when Maya and Ben came along. They’re gorgeous, really, you’d love them. I tried so hard for their sake, but Chrissie and I just grew further and further apart, and in the end it was unbearable. When I came back home from work, she wasn’t the person I wanted to talk to. I didn’t want to tell her about the little thoughts I had, the things I saw in the street that made me smile or feel sad. I just knew she wouldn’t understand, she didn’t ‘do’ complicated or murky, she didn’t question. She saw the world in black and white and wasn’t interested in the grey areas. And eventually I realized that the only thing that matters is finding someone who you properly connect with, who understands you. Otherwise, what’s the point?

And so, I left. It was not a decision I took lightly. I agonized over it for months and months. Went to a shrink. Talked to my friends. They all tried to talk me out of it. But I had to do it, for my sanity.

I wouldn’t say that you were the reason I did it. After all, I hadn’t spoken to you for years. But I did think about you a lot, about what you stood for, and I think that’s what gave me the strength to do it. You were – are – the only person I know who has the courage not to live their life by convention.

P.S. I know that you won’t know how to reply to this, so please don’t. I don’t expect anything from you; I just wanted to tell you.

The next morning, he was back to his cheery, inconsequential one-line emails, as if nothing had happened. That afternoon, however, he asked me to send him a photograph. I pointed out that there was one on my Facebook page and asked him to befriend me; to my surprise, he replied saying he didn’t ‘do’ Facebook.

It’s rubbish. Old school email’s the way forward.

I duly sent him a picture of Tess leaning against the rail at Sointula harbour; my most successful attempt at Photoshop.
Fuck me
, he replied,
you’re even more gorgeous than you were nine years ago. How did you manage that?
But of course, without him befriending me on Facebook, I couldn’t see what he looked like – which, by that point, I was rather curious about. I looked him up anyway, in case by not ‘doing’ it he meant that he didn’t like it, not that he wasn’t on it at all. As I said, there were dozens of Connor Devines from London listed and of course I didn’t know which one of them he was – if, indeed, he was any of them. And several of the profiles didn’t have photographs – or had those ones where you couldn’t see the person’s face, just their silhouette or the back of their head – so it was also possible he was one of them.

Obviously I couldn’t risk asking him which profile was his, in case it was one of the ones with a picture; nor could I risk sending a request to all the likely Connor Devines, in case several of them accepted. The information would show up on my profile, and would look suspicious.

I wrote back asking if he could send me a photograph –
come on, you’ve seen me, fair’s fair
–
and got an attachment within half an hour.

The picture showed a man in close-up, apparently in a park. He was wearing sunglasses but also had a scarf tied in a loop around his neck, so I surmised it might have been spring or autumn, when the sun was shining but the temperature still chilly. He had short dark hair with a little tufty bit at the front, like that cartoon character – I can’t remember his name and without access to Google I can’t find out – and his ears stuck out. His eyebrows were thick and he had lots of dark stubble. He was smiling straight at the camera, but I couldn’t see his eyes behind the glasses. If he was Tess’s age, then he would be almost forty.

I am finding it quite hard to write about Connor in an objective manner, not coloured by emotion or hindsight, but I am trying. At the time, what I remember thinking on reading his confessional email was surprise that a relationship could mean so much to one person, and so little to the other. Here was Connor saying that the time he had with Tess was the most exciting period of his life, yet I asked Tess over and over again to tell me about every person she had had a relationship with, however brief and insignificant, and she never mentioned him. I don’t think that she held back for any reason: after all, she told me about lots of terrible things she had done, and she didn’t seem to mind what I thought of her. She must have totally forgotten about it.

On Skype one evening she said something along those lines. ‘It’s so weird, isn’t it, how you can have a one-night stand with someone and never forget them, and then go out with someone for, like, six months, and they leave no trace on you. The moment it’s over, you forget about it. Don’t you think?’

‘Mmmm,’ I said.

Obviously Tess and I were very different people. But I felt that if I had done any of the things that Connor said he and Tess had done together – dancing on the tables at a Spanish bar in Soho, gatecrashing an awards ceremony for gas fitters at a fancy hotel, going to Paris just for lunch – or if someone told me that I was the most extraordinary person they had ever met, I would have remembered them.

Something else happened at the commune today. I wasn’t going to mention it, but I confess I still feel rather shaken, and perhaps it’ll help to write it down.

I woke this morning with the usual film of grease over my skin and my hair stiff and sticky. My customary cleansing with Wet Wipes felt unequal to the job, and I felt a great desire for a proper wash with water. I remembered Annie saying yesterday that she and the children had gone down to the river to bathe, and so I asked her how to get there. She immediately offered to come with me but I demurred; judging from her casual display of her bosoms, I suspected that she would expect us all to take our clothes off.